"Moultrie," said the girl, slowly, "I do not wish to deny it. I never said I did not love you, for I love you more dearly than you know or than you ever will know. I said I would not marry you, but not, oh, not on Flower’s account. I believe implicitly in all I have said of her. If that were all, I would marry you to-morrow. But that is not the reason."
"Then what is? Oh, Carolina, love, _love_!"
"You don’t know me at all, Moultrie, or you would know what I am going to say."
"I reckon I don’t, dear, for I haven’t an idea of the reason."
"Well, it is because we never could be happy together, holding such different ideals and such different codes of honour. Colonel Yancey told my father in London that he would find the South heart-breaking, and it is."
The young man stared into her lovely face in a very genuine astonishment.
"Our codes of honour different, Carolina?" he said. "Oh, I hope not. I should be sorry to think that your code of honour differed from mine."
"Don’t call me friend! I am not your friend! I am your lover!"
"No, let me call you friend, for that is all that I can call you at present. I should be sorry to hold a code of honour no higher than yours."
The slow, dark flush of pride and race rose in the man’s fine face. Carolina was daring to say such words to a La Grange. But Carolina herself was a Lee.
"I should be sorry," said Carolina, deliberately, not waiting for his reply, "to be so narrow that I could refuse an offer to improve my land, denuded and mortgaged as it is,--an offer for the only rights I had left to sell, and which would give me plenty of money to enable me to restore the home of my ancestors,--simply because the syndicate furnishing the money was composed of Northern men, thus, for a senseless prejudice, compelling my mother and sister to eke out their income by sewing for _negroes_!"
Had Carolina struck him in the face, he could not have turned a whiter countenance upon her than he did. Twice he opened his lips to speak and twice closed them again with the futile words still unspoken. His hands were clenched at his side, his whole figure rigid with outraged pride. Yet he continued to look his accuser in the face, and Carolina honoured him for his courage even while she could see self-knowledge dawn and humiliation take the place of his dethroned pride. The first blow had been struck which was to unmask his pitiable attitude,--the attitude of the typical young Southerner of to-day, proud of his worn-out prejudices, and unaware that his very pride in them is in rags.
